Tor: Hellchild's Bodyguard Job Turns Into Something Worse

Tor: Hellchild's Bodyguard Job Turns Into Something Worse Tor calls himself an employer. That's probably the first thing worth keeping in mind with him, because a lot of what he says in Hellchild: Blood Money sounds almost reasonable if you ignore everything he's actually doing. Two women who worked for him are dead. A wealthy man's son was there. The father had the bodies removed and tried to make the problem disappear. Tor wants answers. Put that much in front of somebody without the rest of the story and you could almost make him sound like the person looking for justice. Then you watch him get those answers. He has Logan tied to a chair and has been taking his fingers. Ben, who actually shot Tina when she tried to call for help, tells Tor that Jake did it. Tor kills Ben anyway. Logan gives him the name he needs, asks for a quick death, and Tor tells him he's not a monster. Then he has Logan's head cut off. The head eventually gets handed to Jake in a nightclub. So there's his idea of being reasonable. What bothers me more than the violence is how consistently he talks about ownership. The women aren't people he's grieving. They're his property. Vera explains that even when somebody enters the escort business willingly, leaving isn't really an option. Other women never chose it at all. They're kidnapped and trafficked. Later we find out Tor supplies people to an auction where the buyers aren't just wealthy criminals. They're monsters buying human beings. That changes the whole job Angelica took. She's supposed to be protecting an obnoxious rich kid. Now she's dealing with a man whose business runs on people not being able to get away from him. And physically getting away from Tor is a problem too. Angelica beats him, and he is still strong enough to grab her by the throat and put her down. He leaps over traffic while chasing Jake and Vera. She hits him with a car, and then a truck hits him. There's enough damage that Jake thinks they've finally gotten rid of him. They haven't. Tor gets up and crushes the truck driver's phone rather than let him call the police. If we're looking at the science side, that sequence gives us something concrete to discuss without making up a species for him. Surviving an impact and being able to stand up and exert force immediately afterward are two different things. Human bones, organs, blood vessels and the nervous system all have to keep functioning together. Getting back to work after that kind of visible trauma is where Tor leaves ordinary human toughness behind. The comic shows the result. It doesn't give us a biological explanation or a recovery rate we can calculate. He also doesn't get the clean ending you might expect. Angelica wrecks the auction, but Tor escapes. The final issue leaves him alive and planning what comes next. That's important to his part of the story. Angelica saves people and destroys a piece of the operation. She does not get to say the man supplying it is gone. Tor is still out there, still treating the whole thing like business, and still deciding that somebody else owes him for the damage.